


Your Shadow, My Ghost

by irisbleufic



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Aftermath, Alternate Canon, Alternate Universe, Canon Character of Color, Childhood, Conflict, Drift Side Effects, F/M, Families of Choice, Family, Gen, Ghost Drifting, Grief/Mourning, Jaeger Pilots, Jaegers, Kaiju, Kicking Kaiju Ass, M/M, Rivalry, Science Husbands, Sibling Love, Siblings, Tokyo (City)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-05
Updated: 2014-01-05
Packaged: 2018-01-07 12:29:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,060
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1119840
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irisbleufic/pseuds/irisbleufic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Their shared wonder at the sight of the imposing ranger surveying his handiwork is suffused with shock, and gratitude, too, but Mako knows as Jiro's hands close tightly around hers, cradling her shoe, that it is mostly a sense of </i>this is what we must become.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Your Shadow, My Ghost

**Author's Note:**

> For one of my lovely Tumblr anons, who made the following fic request— _Could you write an AU in which Mako did end up having a slightly older brother who survived the kaiju attack along with her?_ I don't know whether Mako was supposed to have an older brother at some point in the screenwriting process or not, but this idea was intensely intriguing to me given the fact that Raleigh had an older brother, too. This means, of course, that OMC above refers to the brother I've created for Mako. As this is obviously an AU, I've also tweaked a few other things; this will become obvious, as Tacit Ronin obviously had different pilots in canon than it does in this story. This is the second of five _PR_ prompt fills I'm doing; [**you can find the first fill here**](http://irisbleufic.tumblr.com/post/72063212621/pr-prompt-fill-1-flashback).
> 
> This story includes a piece of artwork that was kindly drawn by [**tfotr**](http://tfotr.tumblr.com/).

They flee hand in hand, frantic, and it's all Mako can do to keep hold of the shoe dangling by its strap from her aching fingers. She's sobbing, breathless, it's foolish, she _knows_ this, but Jiro does nothing to quiet her, says nothing to judge: he narrows his eyes, breathing hard, and fixes them on the least debris-strewn trajectory he can manage. Gravel and bits of glass bite into the bottom of Mako's right foot through the thin fabric of her stocking. They're orphans now, she knows this. They keep running.

"This way," Jiro hisses, letting go of Mako's hand to push her ahead of him down the alley. " _Quick_ , Mako. Let's hide." He never shouts, never sounds angry, and Mako has never been more grateful for her brother's likeness to their father in her life.

Mako gasps and points to a row of dumpsters, and Jiro nods. She's the one to back him against the building's brick wall and pull him down for shelter. They huddle together as the ground shakes, the kaiju drawing ever closer. It doesn't look like the others she's seen on television; it reminds her of the _heikegani_ , those crabs Carl Sagan talks about in _Cosmos_. She wonders if the helicopters racing overhead, with a clear view of the creature's back, can see the face of Trespasser in its patterning.

The kaiju's roar is terrible, obscene, and the air vibrates thick with despair.

Mako can't stop shaking, can't stop sobbing; she wants to peer around the corner, at least end her life staring that hungry ghost in the face. She is eleven years old, her brother is fourteen years old, and _they are going to die_. Jiro squeezes her hand tighter, tucks her in tight against his chest, and tells her, "Don't look back."

The next five minutes are a blur of screeching, crashing, and gunfire. Jiro opens his eyes and says one word, _Jaeger_ , under his breath. Mako can't stop herself; she squirms out of his grasp, staggers into the alley, and all she can do is _stare_.

"What are you _doing_?" Jiro pleads, grabbing her shoulders. "You could have been—"

Their shared wonder at the sight of the imposing ranger surveying his handiwork is suffused with shock, and gratitude, too, but Mako knows as Jiro's hands close tightly around hers, cradling her shoe, that it is a sense of _this is what we must become_.

 

* * *

Stacker Pentecost is a stern, yet doting father, and Mako adores him for it.

Jiro is quieter in his devotion, less obvious. He averts his eyes when Stacker dabs at his nose with a handkerchief, pretends not to notice the ever-present tin of medication. When Mako is fifteen, she asks Stacker to tell her what it is and what it's for; he explains in gentle, no-nonsense terms exactly what his past has done to him.

After school the next day, Mako tells Jiro what she's learned. He's silent, offers no comment, and Mako doesn't know whether he'll go on like that, stubborn, or if the tears he's been holding back since the day Onibaba took their parents will drown him.

"I'm old enough to join the Jaeger Academy next year," she says, taking his hand firmly between her own. "Please, Jiro. We need to ask him _now_. Let's apply together."

Jiro's eyes are wet, finally spilling over, but he manages a teasing smile.

"What if I'm not drift-compatible with my sister? What then, little witch?"

Mako covers her mouth, between laughter and tears; it's an old joke between them, one he hasn't made in years. When she was small, he'd spell her name 魔子 instead of 眞子 just to annoy her, tell her she's made more of sorcery than truth. Maybe it's the blue streaks she'd put in her hair a few weeks back. Stacker had sent her to her room and forbidden her to train that night, the worst punishment imaginable, but he hasn't asked her to dye over them or so much as mentioned them again.

She touches his arm, spells out his name there in swift strokes. 治郎: _reign, son_.

"He loves us very much, Jiro. We're grown up now. I think that he'll understand."

They go to Stacker's office together, hand in hand, and humbly make their request. He doesn't speak to them for two days; on the third, they wake to applications slipped under their doors. They train harder than they ever have. He hugs them harder, too.

 

* * *

At sixteen, Mako is one of the two youngest recruits in their cohort. There are a few seventeen year-olds and a handful of eighteen year-olds, but most range from nineteen up through mid-twenties. At nineteen, Jiro is solidly average.

The other sixteen year-old, Chuck, an Australian recruit who picks on him for having brought along his kid sister, ends up with a black eye when it turns out he isn't quick enough to evade Mako's fists. It takes Jiro and an instructor to pull her off him.

People mostly leave them alone when word about their father gets around.

Their skills in the combat room are deemed exceptional, so they're shuffled quickly into Drift Sync Testing. The J-Techs marvel at how quickly she and Jiro hit alignment, say they've only ever seen the likes of that in a Russian couple who'd graduated the year before. Mako knows about the Kaidanovskys and can't help but feel a swell of pride; Jiro doesn't say anything, but she knows that it's not _necessary_.

For them, Pons Training is an almost embarrassing formality. All but one of their simulations result in kills; on their third run, Mako chases the RABIT and veers out of alignment. Jiro finds her in the wreckage of a Tokyo alley and quietly pulls her out.

Stacker visits them at the twelve-week point, his familial visit disguised as an official inspection. He gives no indication that he's proud as he watches them spar with both each other and miscellaneous recruits, shows no sign of being impressed as they bring down a simulated nightmare eerily reminiscent of Kaiceph.

Later, in their quarters, they find gifts: Mako laces up her calf-high oxblood Doc Martens with glee, and she notices the next morning at breakfast that Jiro has his nose stuck in a vintage issue of Gaiman's _Sandman_. She hopes he'll let her borrow it.

They don't see Stacker again until graduation, and _then_ he looks proud.

 

* * *

They are assigned to Tacit Ronin in the Tokyo Shatterdome, and they are deadly.

For a Mark-1, Ronin is light and agile, but Stacker tells Mako that it's more to do with the exceptionally stable neural handshake she shares with Jiro than anything else. His nose bleeds more frequently now, even as Mako and her brother see less and less of him. He visits in early 2017, in the wake of their first kill, a Category II, and tells them they mustn't let it go to their heads.

Later that year, they kill again; for all of the year following, the ocean is silent. They train and hang around LOCCENT until the doldrums grow unbearable. Stacker comes to visit for an entire week, an unaccustomed pleasure, and warns Jiro against reading too much, lest he grow slack.

When K-Science sends somebody to give a lecture on kaiju biology, Mako attends alone and likes Doctor Geiszler instantly. Afterward, in spite of the flight he's got to catch the next morning, Newton accepts Mako's invitation to dinner, and they end up poring over graphic novels with Jiro long into the night. Mako thinks she might like a tattoo one day, but she doesn't mention it to Stacker.

In February 2019, the first Category III ever documented lurches out of the sea.

This monster is different from their previous kills: smarter, faster, and seemingly ready for what's coming. For every blow that Mako and Jiro deal to its dragon-like neck, its clawed front limbs, its serpentine tail, it strikes back twice as hard.

Thirty minutes into the encounter, they've lost one fist-blade and have patchy motor function in Tacit's left leg. Jiro is tiring more quickly than Mako remembers him tiring previously, and she takes as much of the neural load as she can bear. She catches Jiro's eye, sagging a little, and they raise their right arms in tandem, drive their remaining blade straight through the kaiju's throat.

In a spectacular parting shot, the creature's ugly head snaps down and takes out half the Conn-Pod with Jiro still inside it.

Mako doesn't hear him scream, but she blacks out beneath the sheer, overwhelming horror of his grief.

 

* * *

When Mako files for reassignment to follow Stacker wherever he goes, the PPDC doesn't deny her request. Overseeing Jaeger repairs and restoration is safer, and she has a keen eye for choosing compatible co-pilots for those who have lost their first and nonetheless insist that they go on fighting.

Stacker has never once asked her if she wishes to return to active duty.

Mako has spoken to others who have lost their co-pilots in the line of duty—siblings and lovers, partners and children—but very few of them mention the worst of what's left behind. Jiro haunts her every thought; her dreams are more drift than sleep, awash in grey-blue-sepia _This is what we are, witch-sister; do you love me even now?_

Sometimes, when she wakes screaming, Stacker is seated motionless next to her bed.

The decommissioning ought not to have come as a surprise; Newton's letters had been full of nervous chatter about rumors of funding cuts to K-Science and then _actual_ funding cuts, so it only stands to reason that cuts to combat operations must spell the end. Stacker and Hansen won't go down without a fight, though, and neither will she.

Eight months of funding and the Hong Kong Shatterdome are what they get, and she supposes it's better than nothing. It means she'll get to see Doctor Geiszler again, have conversations about comic books that she hopes will soothe Jiro's restless ghost.

Mako finds out the blow-hard she'd punched at the Academy is Hansen's cocky son, his co-pilot on Striker Eureka. She and Chuck avoid each other as aggressively as they can, but the Shatterdome quickly grows claustrophobic.

She flees to the lab when she's not overseeing Gipsy Danger's restoration and finds that even Newton is plagued by a hateful, loving shadow from which he can't seem to escape. _At least yours wears flesh_ , Mako thinks. _Touch him while there's still time_. Doctor Gottlieb is charming in his way, and she wonders if those his edges will soften the closer they come to disaster, perhaps even break Newton's fall.

Six months into their restless preparations, Stacker finally locates Raleigh Becket.

 

* * *

_You know the rest of the story, but what you don't know is that days will continue to be hard going and that nights will grow harder still. You don't know if Jiro and Yancy get along yet, not exactly, but their memories merge and skirt the edge of daylight._

_Jiro sends inquisitive flares into Raleigh's sleeping mind, eventually securing a confidant; Yancy eventually reaches past him with sly, charismatic tendrils to sound you out. You don't have the heart or the sense to be disturbed, and Raleigh, long past fighting what he finds in the aftermath, greets Jiro with thoughts open wide._

_You ask Newton what it's like sharing your head with just somebody who's alive, but the truth is that he and Hermann sometimes have nightmares of which you are fiercely relieved you experience only a sliver. He says it's better to have someone, says that the two of you are the lucky ones because your drift partners are alive and breathing in your beds. You don't mention that the dead ones are there, too, watching and wanting and often inseparable. You watch Hermann brush the back of Newton's hand with his thumb and wonder if even_ heikegani _are tamed by mercy._

_For now, you hold Raleigh's hand and stroll through cities you've only ever dreamed of visiting. You smile for the cameras and answer endless reporters' questions, although often it's easier to let Raleigh do the talking, what with his easy, affable grace._

_Some nights, Stacker's voice is as you recall it in life, cradled safe in the red child's shoe you imagine in place of your heart._

 


End file.
